Interview #125 — Eunice Andrada
by Cher Tan
Eunice Andrada is a Filipina poet and teaching artist. Her debut poetry collection Flood Damages (Giramondo Books) won the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Poetry and the Dame Mary Gilmore Award.
Her previous works have won the John Marsden and Hachette Australia Poetry Prize (2014), as well as been shortlisted for the Fair Australia Prize (2018). She has performed her poetry on diverse international stages, from the Sydney Opera House to the UN Climate Negotiations in Paris.
When did you start writing poetry? How has it evolved since the beginning?
I started writing quite late: it was a way of processing trauma and looking at the difficult relationships I had with the people closest to me. Thematically, my writing has stayed consistent since then, though along the way, my poetry has also been a platform for issues I’m passionate about, such as the way climate change and neo-imperialism affects the Philippines. Since I began writing, I’ve learned more about how to write poetry in a way that heals instead of preserves wounds.
Many writers often speak about writing as a form of catharsis. I'm interested to hear about your relationship to it, especially when you say you've learnt to write poetry to kickstart the process of healing. Some of your poems, such as 'novena for fidelity' and 'a room for each prayer', have a heavy emphasis on religion. What kind of role(s) has faith played in your life?
Faith and performative worship have played immense role in my upbringing. As a result, it's definitely shaped my writing voice, too. I grew up in a protestant Christian household, and when my mother was away for a few years I lived in the homes of my Buddhist aunt and my Catholic grandmother, who would engage in pre-colonial spiritual traditions alongside her Catholic practices.
I still carry a lot of fascination for the rituals of worship I witnessed and had participated in: the ancestor worship, the burning of incense, the weekly confession, the memorisation of prayers, the processions and the parades. This interest in ritual practice has affected my writing in ways I usually don’t immediately notice, until the writing is done or until I speak the poem aloud for the first time. It’s only then that I realise how interwoven the music of prayer is.
But on a more personal note, seeing the way my mother’s faith has carried us through various forms and layers of violence has made me cling to my faith even more. In poetry, my faith has provided me with a language where I feel at home enough to speak about grief and shame. Beyond the poetry, my faith acts as a spiritual home for me to return to again and again, until I can return to my body for comfort.
What keeps you open to new possibilities for language, be it English or otherwise? How do you stay in a space where you can always perceive new possibilities?
Coming from a multilingual family like mine, you start to become aware of the limitations of each language, particularly in oral expression. My family would substitute fragments of sentences for Tagalog, Hiligaynon or English to find the right fit, so I grew up listening to hybrid sentences all the time.
In writing, I suppose this awareness of the limitations of the English language has propelled me to look elsewhere; to the music of other words, sounds, tones. My family is ethnically Ilonggo, and aside from Tagalog and English, we speak Hiligaynon. And because of these languages at home, I tend to have an awareness of tone, accent and force when I write. Some of the poems in Flood Damages are dappled with Tagalog words or “ethnicised” English—English with syllables broken apart, dragged out or contracted to reflect the way they would sound if my ma/grandma would speak these.
I’m also very aware of the different tones I slip into when I speak English/Tagalog/Hiligaynon. Tagalog is heavily percussive (the plosive k’s, b’s, the hard p’s, etc). The diaphragm carries it differently; the mouth opens wider to accommodate the sounds. Hiligaynon is, again, different in its musicality. It’s known as one of the most melodic languages of the Philippines—the people who speak it have a reputation for gentleness and, I’ll say it, romance. Ask any Filipino and they’ll gush about the idea of having Ilonggo lovers—I’m not bragging, its true! My mother carries the most wonderful Ilonggo music in her body and Tagalog sounds so different when she speaks it. I touch on this briefly in the poem “2nd coming”—where two boatmen immediately recognise my Ilonggo roots when I speak Tagalog.
Perhaps it’s because I was exposed to these different tonalities and accents that I’m concerned about the aesthetic of sound when I write and speak the poems aloud. Listening to the work spoken often helps me direct the rest of the writing.
Since I began writing, I’ve learned more about how to write poetry in a way that heals instead of preserves wounds.
During the process of this interview, you briefly mentioned that you don't see a difference between the often-emphasised distinctions between “spoken word poet” and “poet”. As someone who has done both, what do you think results in this split, and how do you reconcile the two?
I’ve felt some discomfort about this needless differentiation since I first started reading out my work in public. A few years ago, when I mentioned this discomfort to my former mentor Candy Royalle, she laughed and advised me to correct those who would call me a “spoken word poet” or a “slam poet” and say, “No, I’m a poet”.
The division between the two was established by old white writers who want to preserve the “legitimacy” of their poetics while attacking the legitimacy of those who perform spoken word, who are often young and come from marginalised communities.
It’s bullshit. It’s all just poetry. I feel like the people who set up this divide are the same ones who bore audiences when they read their poems. Just saying.
There's a lot around “writing the body” in literature. I notice your work to contain elements of gender and the body too. As a woman of colour, do you think this is something you have to do to actualise your corporeality—especially as we inhabit bodies that have been historically invisibilised and/or fetishised? Do you see it as a way of somehow subverting past trauma(s), or something else?
Providing a testament to my own corporeality is not the objective when I write from the body, no. It’s not my job as a woman of colour to try to humanise myself and the experiences of people who come from similar backgrounds. I don’t have to prove my humanity or the reality of my being to the white gaze.
One of the urgent reasons I write is to reclaim the power from which people like me—women of colour, survivors of violence, immigrants, fetishised bodies, etc.—have been dispossessed. When I write from the body, I try to hold a mirror not only to myself, but to the reader and the world, too. Perhaps one of the best examples of this is “alternative texts for my aunt’s whitening cream”, where the narrator reflects the physical and sexual violence perpetrated by imperialist powers, sex tourists, men with yellow fever, y’know, general scum of the earth-type folks.
Writing from my coloured female body has been a powerful outlet for me to reclaim my voice and my body for myself. I don’t need another witness to validate what I’ve experienced or the ways I survive in my body every day. Through my writing, I can be my own witness, and that’s enough.
Your book, Flood Damages, is a scintillating collection of poetry that deftly flits between real and imagined worlds, which rings back to what you've said once: “Through reimaginations, I find new ways of articulating truth.” Can you speak more to that?
A lot of the poems in Flood Damages detail memories that are still painful for me to revisit. In the writing of these poems, I’ve attempted to find new languages and forms to synthesise truth and trauma, perhaps in ways that enable the memory to be recorded as though they did not happen to my own body or to the bodies of the ones I love. This process has ended up producing poems that lay out moments as though they were captions that accompany the photographs of strangers (as seen in the poem 'photo album', for example) when in reality they were real moments that happened to us.
I’ve been discovering new meanings to the process of articulating—or re-articulating—truth as I continue to unpack body-blood memory in my new poems. I’m still working this all out, too—the ways I distance myself from my writing by bringing dead dictators back to life (etc.), while at the same time unconsciously imbuing poems with symbols and figures that are so bound up in my experiences. In the end, on the page, it’s all truth in some light.
The division between the two was established by old white writers who want to preserve the “legitimacy” of their poetics while attacking the legitimacy of those who perform spoken word, who are often young and come from marginalised communities.
Do you have any advice for emerging poets?
Don’t be afraid to ask for advice from the more established poets you admire. I’m the fangirl who sends emails to my favourite WOC poets and asks to have a coffee with them. They’ve often given me brilliant advice on negotiating in the literary world. It’s also just hella fun to be with people who know all about what you’re experiencing and to talk shit with them.
Another important thing is to remember that if you’re a WOC or a poet from a marginalised group, your kin is not your competition. We have to amplify each other and make as much space as we can for each other.
Who are you inspired by?
All femmes of colour, single mamas, survivors, all the grandmas who think they can’t write poems or stories yet speak poetry in their ancestral wisdom, all the young girls who are “not poets” and “not writers” but have so much to tell.
What are you currently listening to?
My Spotify history lists Joy Crookes, Burna Boy, Kali Uchis, and my karaoke playlist (Whitney Houston, Celine Dion and Barbra Streisand forever).
And apparently Mariah Carey was my Spotify Artist of the Decade, so there’s always some Mariah playing in the background.
Don’t be afraid to ask for advice from the more established poets you admire.
What are you currently reading?
Tons of fun, smutty Star Wars fanfiction revolving around my faves Poe Dameron, Kylo Ren and General Hux. That and The Tradition by Jericho Brown.
How do you practise self-care?
Lately, self-care has meant the need to withdraw from audiences and focus on my mental health before I can share myself with the world again. So I’ve been taking time off from public events and using that energy to re-focus on writing and being. Spending a lot of time over a hot stove cooking laborious stews has also been an aromatic outlet for reflection and self-care.
What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?
Even after seven years in Australia, I don’t think I’ve ever used the term to describe myself. For most of my life in the Philippines, I’ve identified primarily as Filipina—more specifically, as Ilongga, as my family is from Iloilo.
Maybe I can’t really talk about being “Asian-Australian” because it’s something I don’t really identify with. I wasn’t raised with the influence of Australian culture and I haven’t had to face the shitty things my Asian-Australian friends have had to as they were growing up here. So I can’t really talk about being “Asian-Australian”, but I think the term itself homogenizes so many different cultures and doesn’t make space for cultural complexity.
What I can talk about is my experience of being Asian in Australia, which means having access to privileges that I would have never been able to benefit from before. It means being a settler on Aboriginal land. It means a struggle for decolonisation, shared with the traditional custodians of this land and with diaspora communities.
Maybe I can’t really talk about being “Asian-Australian” because it’s something I don’t really identify with.
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Interview by Cher Tan
Photographs by RJ Dela Rosa